General Anesthesia and Autonomic Nervous System in Children

Some physiological factors such as sport activity or pathological as sepsis, certain chronic diseases or diabetes are known to modulate the overall autonomic activity and the intrinsic capacity of the individual to regulate its sympathovagal balance. These influences can alter the physiological autonomic balance sometimes with positive consequences on the Cardiac frequency-breathing control, blood pressure adjustment depending on the position of the individual, on the status of blood volume, but sometimes deleterious with bad regulation of sinus cardiac activity and respiration rate.

General anesthesia is recognized as one of the factors that can modify more or less sustainable the sympathovagal autonomic balance. While many studies described the effects of anesthesia on the autonomic nervous system, most data are done in adult subjects. For the child who sees intrinsically autonomic physiological changes related to its maturative status, assessment of the impact of anesthesia in the pediatric population in per and postoperative was never realized.